12.Deadly.Little.Secrets.2012 (35 page)

Long balked, not willing to give Bulls the type of immunity that ensured she couldn’t be tried for any crime tied to Kari Baker’s death. “I didn’t know what her involvement was, and I wasn’t going to give her a get-out-of-jail-free card,” says Long. Instead, he offered testimonial immunity, which guaranteed only that her grand jury testimony couldn’t be used against her. At that, an agreement was signed.

Inside the room, the grand jurors listened as Long asked questions of Bulls, including ones about her relationship with Baker, stressing all the phone calls. “She admitted a certain extent of relationship but not boyfriend girlfriend.” Bulls appeared nervous. Her eyes were red, and at times she cried, as she had with police, usually when her little girl, Lilly, was mentioned. Gradually, Long worked up to the most important question: “Did Matt Baker ever tell you anything about his wife’s death?”

“He told me that he killed her to be with me,” Bulls answered.

“We were all stunned,” says Long. “None of us expected her to say that.”

That same afternoon, the McLennan County grand jury returned an indictment on the charge of murder against Matthew Dee Baker.

John Bennett was helping a friend remodel a house when the phone rang.

“They’ve done it,” Linda said, crying. “They’ve indicted Matt.”

At four the following afternoon, Thursday, March 26, 2009, nearly three years after Kari’s death, Matt Baker again turned himself in at the Kerr County Courthouse. On a charge of murder, based on an indictment stating that he’d drugged then suffocated his wife, the bond was set at half-a-million dollars. Two weeks later, Ellison argued successfully and had Baker’s bond reduced to $250,000. The following day, Matt posted bond and was released, to await his trial.

I
mmediately after Bulls’s grand jury testimony ended, Rodriguez told Susan Shafer he wanted another interview with the woman at the center of the Baker case. “I want the whole story,” Rodriguez said. Shafer agreed, and on March 20, the investigator and his prime witness came face-to-face again, this time in her attorney’s office. As the interview progressed, Bulls fluctuated, initially denying then admitting that her relationship with Baker had been sexual, but still claiming it didn’t start until after Kari’s death. At Kensi’s party, she said she slept on the couch while Matt slept in his bedroom. “I have information that you slept in the same bed,” Rodriguez bluffed.

“Okay,” she said. “We did.”

“I have information that even before Kari’s death, you were at his house,” Rodriguez challenged, gradually pulling out more detail. To get her to talk, over and again, Rodriguez acted as if he understood Bulls, and that he sided with her, saying repeatedly that Baker had used the pretty young woman.

“Yes,” she agreed.

The account that Bulls finally gave that day was that in the beginning, Matt counseled her on the telephone, until one day when he insisted they needed to continue their work at his house on Friday afternoons, while his wife and children were at school.

“If you didn’t have anything to hide, why did you park in his garage and put the door down?” Rodriguez asked.

“I don’t know.”

In the end, Vanessa stood fast, saying she hadn’t slept with the errant preacher until Kensi’s birthday party.

As their time together drew to a close, Rodriguez turned off his tape recorder.

“Do you believe me now?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Because I know you all had sex prior to Kari’s death. Y’all were having an affair, and you had sex at his house.”

“Just one,” she said. “One Friday only. One of those Fridays we did have sex.”

“Well, okay.”

“Do you believe me now?”

“Well, I still believe that you provided that,” Rodriguez said, referring to a more frequent sexual relationship.

“No,” she said. “I promise. I would never tell you I did that.”

As the trial approached, Bulls hired a new attorney, this one a criminal defense lawyer, Russ Hunt, Sr. A bearded man with glasses, Hunt was a Baylor University law graduate and a former prosecutor. One of his first acts was to inform Shafer and Long that his client refused to have any further contact with Abdon Rodriguez. When he heard the news, the investigator laughed. He understood why. “That’s fine,” he said to Shafer. “But tell them I need to have one last interview with her. She’s still not telling us everything.”

Over Labor Day weekend 2009, that interview took place at the DA’s Office in the book-lined law library, with Vanessa’s attorney present. At first, Bulls appeared reluctant, saying, “You know, this is going to make me look bad. What about my job?”

“Vanessa, you could be charged with this, too,” Rodriguez said. “You could be going to prison and leaving your daughter and family. Just think, you’re going to be free. I don’t know what’s going to happen with your job. It’s not going to look good for you, all the involvement you’ve had. But you will be free rather than behind bars.”

At that, Rodriguez and Shafer left the room, so that Hunt could talk to his client. Afterward, Shafer would form the opinion that the woman at the center of the Baker case finally comprehended that the charade was over. “I think she realized that it was becoming ridiculous, that we didn’t believe her,” says Shafer. “We were all catching her in so many lies.”

When they returned, Hunt said, “She’d like to talk to you.”

“We just want the truth,” Shafer said. “We don’t want you to elaborate, we just want to know what really happened, what you really know.”

For the next three hours, Bulls appeared to open up, telling Shafer and Rodriguez the details of how the affair began months before Kari’s death. By late February and into March, she said Matt began planning how to kill his wife. As they continued their affair, Bulls said Matt discussed a variety of plans to dispose of his wife, so that he and Bulls could be together, including tampering with the brakes on Kari’s car, staging a drive-by shooting, using chloroform or roofies, the date rape drug, to knock her out, then making it look like a suicide. The methods included hanging Kari or making it appear that she’d intentionally overdosed.

Nonchalantly relaying the conversations, Bulls showed no regret. Instead, she laughed, saying she’d brushed off his ideas as preposterous. In the end, Bulls said Baker focused on drugging Kari. “He talked about putting it in a milk shake,” she said.

When Rodriguez pressed Bulls about where Matt got the Ambien, she said that Matt told her that he’d taken it from Kari’s mother’s medicine cabinet. That wouldn’t have been possible since Linda didn’t have a prescription for the drug, but that day in the DA’s Office, Vanessa had center stage and she told her version of the events surrounding Kari’s death. “Matt said he was going to type the suicide note,” Bulls said. “I told him, ‘You can’t type it. Suicide notes are handwritten.’ ”

“Kari types everything, so I can do it that way,” he said.

This time, the preacher’s ex-mistress admitted that Matt Baker told her beforehand that he’d murder Kari that Friday night. “He had it all planned,” she said.

The next morning, he called her and let her know it was done.

Yet Rodriguez still wondered if Bulls was telling them everything. “Vanessa showed no remorse, and when she talked about Kari’s death, it was as if she didn’t even acknowledge that a woman had died.”

Then Bulls described how Baker said he’d killed Kari. After buying capsules for sexual enhancement on the Net, he emptied the contents and filled the shell with Ambien. Kari was trying hard to keep the marriage together, and she’d been more amenable to doing what he asked. Bulls said Matt realized that, and he planned to use it to get her to take the Ambien by pretending it was a drug to stimulate their sex life.

“Vanessa said that Matt and Kari were drinking the Fuzzy Navel wine coolers, and he gave her the pills,” says Rodriguez. “He handcuffed her to the bed when they were having foreplay, then, of course, she passed out with all the alcohol and Ambien, and he took a pillow and put it over her face.”

Rodriguez had wondered how Kari had pieced it together, how she’d come to suspect that Matt might be having an affair and planning to take her life. Something Vanessa told him that day gave an inkling of a possibility. One day at church while Vanessa was talking to Kari, Vanessa mentioned something Matt had said to her on the telephone. As Vanessa told the story, Kari homed in on the fact that Matt was talking to the music minister’s attractive, young daughter.

“Why were you talking to Matt?” Kari asked, sounding suspicious.

Rodriguez guessed that was when Kari began to suspect the affair. Then when she found the crushed pills, “I think she put it all together.”

In the end, Kari’s mistake was that despite everything, she still loved and believed in Matt, and she never allowed herself to make the leap from suspicion to certainty.

One area that Rodriguez didn’t delve into was Kassidy. One of the accounts Bulls gave that day left a dark cloud over the infant’s death. When she heard that Kari’s body was being exhumed, she called Matt. He was at the cemetery, going to the grave. “Yes, her body’s gone,” he told her. What was so frightening was that he then ran over to see if the authorities had dug up Kassidy’s grave as well. Why would he think that the police might get his daughter autopsied? What did that mean?

“We suspected he might have murdered Kassidy, too,” says the investigator. “But we had no evidence.”

I
n the days that followed that interview, Shafer thought about the woman who’d been Matt Baker’s lover. In a courtroom, Bulls’s testimony could be damning, but there were problems, the major one that Bulls had lied for so long and so often about what she knew. Would a jury believe that now she was telling the truth?

What Shafer needed was physical evidence corroborating Vanessa Bulls’s testimony. One thing immediately came to Shafer’s mind: Bulls said that Matt attempted to murder Kari weeks before her death by feeding her drugs in a milk shake. When Shafer looked through Matt’s e-mails, ones retrieved off the WCY network, she found what she was looking for in an exchange between Kari and Matt dated March 21, 2006, the day before the seventh anniversary of Kassidy’s death. “Do you want anything special tonight?” Matt wrote. “How about a chocolate shake with even MORE chocolate syrup? Just joking. :-) Love you!”

There it was, evidence that two weeks before Kari’s death, Matt had fed his wife a milk shake, one Vanessa Bulls said he’d bragged about lacing with drugs.

One afternoon, Shafer called Bulls and asked another question: Had Matt Baker ever sent her any e-cards or songs? Kersh had explained to Shafer that he had batches of information off Matt’s computers, but it was like being in a library filled with books without a card catalogue. What he needed were specific search terms, things he could use to find the right book/batch of information. When Shafer asked that question, Bulls was silent, then described something that had happened after the murder: “There was this song Matt sang to me, to intimidate me. “Dirty Little Secret” by the All-American Rejects.”

When Shafer looked up the lyrics, she understood why Bulls saw the song as a threat. The words cautioned to keep silent. If secrets were divulged, the chorus warned that she could become “just another regret.”

“Would you look for the song on his computer?” Shafer asked Kersh. “Or the lyrics, anything that ties into it?”

“Sure,” Kersh said. Before long, he called back. “I found it. I found the MP3!”

As Shafer’s dialogue with Bulls continued, other discoveries followed. After Bulls divulged Baker’s passwords, including that he used her name, “Vanessa,” Kersh searched again. This time he found an account with a Fiji travel site. Adding even more confirmation to Shafer’s belief that Bulls was finally telling the truth was an e-mail sent by a booking agent, one that offered Baker congratulations on his upcoming marriage and discussed the details of a Fiji honeymoon.

“It was all checking out,” says Shafer. “The little bits and pieces fit together.”

As they talked, Bulls sounded embarrassed that she’d ever had a relationship with Baker. Says Shafer, “She sounded stunned that she’d trusted him and frustrated with her own willing blindness, that she’d known he was going to kill Kari and never did anything about it.” Now that Vanessa had opened up, “She really did seem to be trying to assist as much as possible.”

The immunity Bulls had been granted wasn’t all-inclusive, so if Shafer and Long discovered any evidence that Vanessa had been instrumental in either planning or carrying out the murder, they had the latitude to prosecute her. “The immunity only covered the grand jury,” says Shafer. “And Vanessa never asked for it again. We never found any evidence that she had done anything other than know about Matt’s plans.”

When they talked, Long and Shafer both believed Vanessa was being honest. First, they saw no reason for her to say what she did if it weren’t true since everything she’d told them made her look bad. Secondly, Bulls didn’t know about the e-mails and other evidence, yet what she said dovetailed with all they had.

At times, Shafer wrestled with the fact that Vanessa knew Matt Baker was going to kill his wife and did nothing. While the prosecutor felt strongly that Bulls should have spoken up, in Shafer’s analysis, she wasn’t sure it would have changed the outcome. “I don’t think anyone would have believed Vanessa,” says Shafer. “Maybe Kari, but that would have taken the mistress calling the wife, and Kari had already voiced suspicions and written them off. She wasn’t ready to believe her husband could kill her.”

If Bulls had talked and prevented Matt from carrying through, Shafer speculated that Matt would have taken action at a later date. “Kari wasn’t in the life Matt wanted for himself,” says Shafer. “If Vanessa wasn’t the one, someone else would have been, and Kari was in the way. With or without Vanessa, Matt would have murdered his wife.”

T
hat spring in Kerrville, still reeling after the death of his second son, Guy James Gray would later say he wasn’t looking to get back into the Baker case. “I don’t think I was in the frame of mind,” he says. “After losing my son, I understood how Kari Baker could have committed suicide. I’d had some of those same thoughts and fought through them.”